That was kind of my point. Many of these places don't have London postcodes nor are in the 020 phone district, and have had their own identity for a very long t

That was kind of my point. Many of these places don't have London postcodes nor are in the 020 phone district, and have had their own identity for a very long time as towns in their own right. Some of them have in recent years been subsumed into boroughs that are now Greater London, but they have historically never been considered to be London. Some of these places inside the M25 are not even in Greater London boroughs. Despite your baseless claim that they are "morally" part of London, factually they aren't. But anyway, my point was that these places in the article aren't really "in London" - they're merely on the periphery, and while it might be administratively convenient to sometimes lump them together as "Greater London", the fact remains that someone in e.g. Ealing when someone says "Let's meet on the High Street" isn't going to get confused and trek over to Acton or any of the other High Streets even further away, because the place feels like its own little area distinct from and separate to the real London.